where was pakistan at that time? in some ways this beak is also a book about america and pakistan, america and islam, so, you know, i don't want to sort of lose sight of those aspects of the book in, you know, in the fine grain because she is a vehicle for a lot of these sort of meditations, but as to the question of what i decided to do with her letters. i felt it was important for -- to have her as a vehicle for the reader to experience her letters, you know, with immediacy in her own words rather than me paraphrasing them or, you know, saying, you know, well, she says that she graduated from high school in 1953, but actually it was 1952. i find that correcting voice as a biographer is very distancing, and i wanted the readers to feel about her the way i felt about her when i first started reading the letters, to be completely sucked into her world, and, you know, if i, you know, had said at the outset that, you know, that she was institutionalized, then you know people will just say she's crazy and not have to wre